I was posed the question by my pc: At what point is a deamon banished from the materium and at what point is it actually destroyed (or can they really be totally destroyed)?

Now, certain powers such as Holocaust state that warp entities are not immune to the effects and if slain are killed forever, however... does this hold true for those slain by Nemesis force weapons as well? The information that I have been able to find on the matter is rather at odds: some of it saying that a warp being would be destroyed and others saying the deamons slain in such a fashion were merely banished, returning at a later date (100 years & 1 day) to exact revenge on the one that banished them.

Any thoughts?

Force weapons wielded by psykers and Holocaust should destroy the daemon. I think psycannon bolts should do the same.

In Dan Abnetts Eisenhorn a daemon gets destroyed by an attack from a force weapon (meaning that it was also destroyed in the warp for good, never to be able to return), so it seems they can be completely destroyed. However the sourcebooks aren't always clear on what different kinds of weapons do to daemons exactly...

With force weapons you could say that "best" quality ones are capable of completely destroying a warp entity that kind of goes with the fluff.

Or you could make the entity succeed on a willpower test you set the difficulty when it gets banished to the warp to see if it is completely destroyed. Prophaniti epically failed his willpower test.

Psyker powers, force weapons, and probably sanctified weapons will destroy a daemon. If I remember right, in one of the printed adventures a null slays a daemon using a sanctified weapon (I don't believe it was a force weapon).

The Sisters Faith powers may or may not slay a daemon.

Anything else simply defeats the physical shell of the daemon and banishes it back to the warp. Now how long the banishment lasts is up to you, so a daemon banished for a millenia is effectivly dead as far as your game is concerned.

Edit: Oh, and another daemon or daemon spawn and sorcery will slay a daemon as well. Just thought I'd add that in as a hint for ways for mundanes to kill off a daemon. *hint hint hint*

Thanks for the replies.

I really like the suggestion of a willpower test, Zarkovian. That would give a reason as to the accounts of very powerful deamons returning at later dates, such as the daemon Ghargatuloth in the Grey Knight recounts.

My acolyte is currently working with a small squad of Grey Knights (face down 2 deamons nearly solo and you get noticed!). Quite and epic adventure so far.. the only down side is the lack of information on the stats of Astartes in general.

IMO, the question should really be "is there a difference?"

The Warp is fundamentally timeless - time exists there only as echoes of mortal comprehension (that is, because we perceive time, echoes of our thoughts carry the notion of time, in some faint, fragile and incomplete form, into the Immaterium). Is is entirely likely, if not an absolute certainty, that every Daemon ever destroyed or banished at any point in the entirety of material existence still exists, having existed at some point in the first place.

Imagine it thusly: A daemon is cast back into the Warp by faith and fire and righteous fury. From a material standpoint, it has been destroyed - it is no more. From the perspective of the Warp, however, nothing really has changed: the moment of its destruction is a single moment of its existence, just like its creation and every moment in between. The Daemon, having existed to begin with, will always exist in the Warp, and should it be summoned again, it will simply manifest from another point in its timeless and entirely nonlinear existence (essentially a past, pre-destruction version of the Daemon is summoned).

From the Daemon's perspective, the matter of destruction is even less relevant - being a timeless entity naturally familiar with the absence of linearity, every moment of its existence is experienced simultaneously - its destruction is never something that has happened or will happen, but rather is happening. The most intelligent, powerful of Daemons can sift through this infinite barrage of simultaneous experience to various degrees, giving them what might be percieved as precognition, the power of prophecy, clairvoyance and clairsentience... but even they can't comprehend all that information at once in any way comparable to mortal, linear thought (in that regard, the relative intelligence and lucidity of a Daemon is really a matter of how well is can comprehend and understand the 'alien' nature of a corporeal, linear, time-reliant universe - the least intelligent of them struggle to understand the material world as much as mortals struggle to understand the Immaterium).

For a Daemon to be truly, utterly and irrevocably destroyed... you'd have to have some means of not just slaying the corporeal shell and sundering the 'soul', but of scouring the Daemon from existence so completely that not only does it no longer exist, it never existed in the first place (at least from the perspective of the Warp; from a linear, material perspective, it's a different matter).

I always took it as anything banished by psychic means is generally destroyed. Generally meaning, the deamon dies unless the GM needs it at a later date

cyclocius said:

That also works very well.

Currently the psyker in my game is being tempted by a daemon she "banished" in an earlier session whenever the veil to the warp weakens. It's fun.

Hi,

I really like your interpretation NO-1_H3r3.

Would you agree that it follows that if a daemon continually experiences all of it existence non-linearly the more times and the more violently it is banished back to the warp in linear time the more effect these events will have upon its character? What I mean to say is that daemon that particuarly hates Grey-Knights is one that has been and will be holocausted and nemesis weaponed back to the warp by them a few times. A daemon hates its banishers as it is perminently suffering the pain of its banishments. Therefore the more times a daemon is banished in linear time the more bitter and perhaps weaker it will be and always will have been as this equates to the pain it is always suffering in the warp.

Equally if i understand what you are saying correctly the more a daemon comes to understand the workings of the linear universe the more it is able to understand that if it enters the material universe at a certain point some of events it is experiencing will not have happened yet in real space. Therefore the most powerful daemons are those that understand that what they achieve in the real universe alters what they are and what they alway have been and will be in the warp. A Fury might instinctivly recognise that killing mortals and eating there souls makes it more powerful in warp, but a greater daemon of Tzeentch understand that it possible to change the way events unfold in the linear universe. The most powerful daemons are actually able to alleviate their pain by working to prevent some of the banishments they are experiencing from ever taking place. Daemon princes are the most powerful and dangerous of daemons precisely because they have a mortals understanding of the real universe.

In order to kill a daemon the daemon itself must have enough of an understanding of the linear universe to recognise that after a certain point in real time has been killed, but not so much of an understanding that it realises that to a daemon time dosn't matter.

I would love to see yours or anybody else's thoughts on this.

Thanks.

AH.

I think the biggest limitation on the destruction of a daemon is its origin in the warp.

They are all components of a larger whole, given form by the god in question or attaining self awareness after a certain critical mass of like-souls/emotions congeal together.

You can't really destroy that. You could perhaps tear apart the daemon's concsious mind, but souls etc don't have a used by date in the warp. That specific daemon personality may be gone, but the energy that composed it would just form another daemon. It's one of the problems with deamons, you can't destroy them, only banish them for a time. The only true way to destroy daemonic entities is to remove emotions from all life, or just destroy all life. Starve them of sustainence.

No One Here makes a good point about the timelessness of daemons. However one of the problems with that is that everything that will ever exist in the warp or has ever will still exist. Even the dead eldar gods. Or gods that haven't been born yet that no one knows about. In such instances those entities would have an affect on the real world, thus making them known before they were 'born'. Which doesn't seem to be the case.

afaik no mortal weapons can literally destroy a daemon. They can unravel their corporeal form so that they are denied access to the material world, but that is a banishment, not a destruction. All the greater daemons 'killed' in battle always come back. M'Kachen, An'ggrath et al.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

Actually, there is a small amount of evidence that it does - the novel Farseer, by Bill King (decent novel, awful ending, IMO) incorporates a Daemon of Slaanesh who was present on the Eldar homeworlds before the Fall. Essentially, it's a daemon that predates the existence of its creator/master from a realspace perspective... Equally, the existence of Skulltaker in the Daemons of Chaos armies for 40k and WFB... he's known variously as U'zhul and The Slayer of Kings - the same names as the daemon within Archaon's sword. In theory, both the individually-manifested daemon and the bound daemon sword could coexist upon a battlefield... while still being the same entity.

It's not much, but it does beg the question... are those eight bloodletters all distinct daemons, or are they all the same bloodletter eight times?

Arch-Heretic: I think a good example of the way Daemons might experience time would be to look at Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen - he experiences every moment in his life simultaneously, but he can't necessarily alter it, and indeed he can still be surprised (though he knows that he'll be surprised and what he'll be surprised by, that still doesn't change the fact that he'll be surprised by it - it isn't a future he can change, it's another present he's currently experiencing). More powerful daemons may be able to influence mortals to change things, but we know that none of them can have a perfect mastery of time - one of the Chaos Daemons special characters (the crippled Lord of Change with two heads, I can't remember the character's name at the moment) has that degree of knowledge forced upon it, and it's insane by the standards of daemons...

A daemon can die, but is never dead. Chaos daemons is warp energy given consciousness - if someone (e.g. a psyker with a force weapon) would be able to destroy the daemons consciousness, he would destroy the daemon, but its energies would create another warp entity, and that daemon could be considered reborn. If one daemon would take another daemons warp energy ,the victim would be no more, yet that daemon could still be considered alive as part of another entity. Most Eldar gods were “eaten” by Slaanesh and are now a part him so still exist in a way-some of Slaaneshi aspects (six domains of his kingdom) are close to Eldar gods spheres of power.

The best way of dealing with a daemon would be to separate it from the warp - e.g. creating a 4-5 times bound daemonhost using a body of some diminutive creature and incarcerate it a null-cell.